f the Pont de Treilles, the one low tower above the
river Mayenne which remains of the walls around the suburb of
Roncevray, show the price which Henry and his sons set on these costly
buildings. They have a special interest in Angevin history, for they
were the last legacy of the Counts to their capital. Across the river,
at the south-west corner of the town itself, stands the huge fortress
that commemorates the close of their rule, the castle begun by the
French conqueror, Philip Augustus, and completed by his descendant St.
Louis. From the wide flats below Angers, where Mayenne rolls lazily on
to the Loire, one looks up awed at the colossal mass which seems to
dwarf even the minster beside it, at its dark curtains, its fosse
trenched deep in the rock, its huge bastions chequered with iron-like
bands of slate and unrelieved by art of sculptor or architect. It is as
if the conquerors of the Angevins had been driven to express in this
huge monument the very temper of the men from whom they reft Anjou,
their grand, repulsive isolation, their dark pitiless power.

It is a relief to turn from this castle to that southern fortress which
the Counts made their home. A glance at the flat tame expanse of Anjou
northward of the Loire explains at once why its sovereigns made their
favourite sojourn in the fairer districts south of the river. There are
few drives more enjoyable than a drive along the Vienne to the royal
retreat of Chinon. The country is rich and noble, deep in grass and
maize and corn, with meadows set in low broad hedgerows, and bare
scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined with acacias,
Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging from their tender feathery boughs,
and here beneath the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden
shrub but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. Everywhere along
the broad sunlit river of Vienne nature is rich and lavish, and nowhere
richer or more lavish than where, towering high on the scarped face of
its own grey cliff above the street of brown little houses edged
narrowly in between river and rock, stands the favourite home of our
Angevin Kings.

It is only in one or two points amidst the great mass of stately
buildings which is known as the castle of Chinon that their hand can be
traced now. The base of the Tour du Moulay, where tradition says the
Grand Master of the Templars was imprisoned by Philippe le Bel, is a
fine vault of twelfth-century date, which